A Year in Reading: Mark O’Connell

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I burst into 2014 all guns blazing, with a new year’s resolution to read all of Marcel Proust’sIn Search of Lost Time by the end of the year. In part, I was provoked into action by a friend of mine casually informing me, in response to my laments about parenthood sucking up all my reading time, that he’d squared away all seven volumes of Proust in the six months following the birth of his son. I was further emboldened by another friend setting up a Proust reading group, which was going to involve Skype-based participation from her nonagenarian grandfather, a retired Oxford professor of French. For reasons too numerous and banal to recount here, the whole thing never panned out, and I went ahead under my own steam — which limited vapor I predictably and depressingly ran out of somewhere between the end of the first volume and the first third of the second. My reasons are these: I have a child, and a thing called the Internet persists in existing.

What did I actually succeed in reading? Well, let me tell you, I read seven shades of shit out of Peck Peck Peck by Lucy Cousins, a delightfully illustrated picaresque romp about a baby woodpecker who goes around pecking a lot of household items under the tutelage of his father, also a woodpecker, before finally settling down to sleep. I read Yasmeen Ismael’sTime for Bed, Fred! — or “Fred,” as my son calls it in his fondly shrill requests to have it read to him — which is about a dog who wears everyone’s patience extremely thin before finally settling down to sleep. I read Buster’s Farm by Rod Campbell, a pop-up book about a small boy called Buster who goes around pointing at, and sometimes petting, an array of farm animals, before finally finding a haystack in which he settles down to sleep. I also read a lot of other books in which children and animals get up to all sorts of adventures before finally settling down to sleep, none of which were even slightly effective as propaganda, but which I nonetheless think of with real fondness, and which no honest account of my year in reading could leave unmentioned.

I also read quite a lot of books which were more appropriate to my own reading age. I wanted to read Eleanor Catton’sThe Luminaries, but I felt I lacked the fortitude to commit to an 850 page novel at just that juncture, so I instead read The Rehearsal, her debut novel about a sex scandal in a girls’ secondary school; but unfortunately that was so brilliant that it left me wearily resigned to having to read The Luminaries as well. (I haven’t, so far, but I will, I will.) I read Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel’s novel about a world in the aftermath of a devastating epidemic and societal collapse, which somehow managed to be haunting and distressing and urgently entertaining all at once. I re-read Mary Shelley’sFrankenstein, which I only vaguely remembered having read the first time, and was deeply affected by its poetic portrait of perversity and loneliness and its dark ambivalence about the technological ingenuity of Homo Sapiens. And I loved the stories in Donald Antrim’sThe Emerald Light in the Air, all of which were appalling funny and lovely in their evocations of loneliness and sadness and middle-aged frustration.

Most of my reading this year — and this is a personal trend that’s been developing for a while now — was non-fiction. One of my favorite new books of 2014 was Leslie Jamison’s collection The Empathy Exams, which I praised intemperately and lengthily in The Slate Book Review earlier in the year. It’s a terrific book about the complexities and confusions of various types of pain; it’s audacious and elegant, ruthless and compassionate, and an exhilarating experience for anyone interested in the creative possibilities of non-fiction. As 2014 wore on, I was starting to worry that people might think I was getting paid off by that book’s publisher, Graywolf, because it seemed like they were putting out a weirdly high proportion of the non-fiction books I most admired (and raved about). I loved On Immunity, Eula Biss’s formally resourceful and intellectually invigorating exploration of the mythologies and anxieties surrounding the practice of vaccination, and had an enjoyably enlightening time of it with Geek Sublime, Vikram Chandra’s book about the history and culture of computer programming.

I also relished every sentence of Objects in This Mirror, Brian Dillon’s new collection of critical and personal essays. The range of topics here is a testament to his versatile curiosity as an observer of culture. Whatever he’s writing about — 19th-century illustrated guides to hand gestures and cravat tying, the aesthetics of ruins, his relationship with the work of Roland Barthes, the Dewey Decimal Classification system, the poetics and politics of slapstick — the casual exactitude of his prose and his formally playful approach to his subjects makes him one of the most consistently interesting and elegant of contemporary essayists.

Infrequent Millions contributor Buzz Poole has written for numerous publications and is the author of Madonna of the Toast. He is also the proprietor of a blog by the same name.Ford Madox Ford'sThe Good Soldier furthers what Henry James had begun to chip away at with his novels of manners and paves the way for the modernist dilemmas that comprise the work of Joyce, Beckett, Eliot and Pound. How do individuals define themselves and interact with others when everything they have known changes? John Dowell's cagey narration folds in on itself and doubles back, making for more questions than answers as the story of two couples besieges what is thought to be the "extraordinarily safe castle" of their lives. As one of the four primary characters, Dowell relates how this quartet's existence was like a minuet, lives of orderly precision that never inspired questioning, until it was too late. The story is Dowell's post-mortem report, which is rich with point-of-view tactics and metaphors cribbed by Ford's successors. As Dowell warns early during his tale: "I don't know. And there is nothing to guide us. And if everything is so nebulous about a matter so elementary as the morals of sex, what is there to guide us in the more subtle morality of all other personal contacts, associations, and activities? Or are we meant to act on impulse alone? It is all a darkness."Four decades later, William Gaddis'sThe Recognitions hit the increasingly surreal, overtly commercialized scene, a potent cocktail of Christian morality, creative license and New York City bohemia. Fitting in somewhere between Joyce and Pynchon, Gaddis's pages read with ease, though he devotes much ink to the blasé poses of just about everyone trying to be someone else. At the center of this carousel of masquerades, painter Wyatt Gwyon, his talent so prodigious, and crippling, he begins to forge the works of Flemish masters. Crafting his own canvases and paints, Gwyon's lines, shadings and textures fool everyone, even Gwyon, to such a degree that his greatest anxiety, and the novel's for that matter, is how to create a copy of something that has never existed. The lexicons of the transfiguration, academia, fine art and advertising mingle and bristle - a wonderful novel of ideas, full of jokes, japes and jabs.The Roberto Bolaño bug also bit me this year, the excitement orbiting around 2666 prompting me to finally read The Savage Detectives and then 2666. Both books have been picked apart enough, and my praise for them echoes much of what has already been written and said. But, for me, what has made the emergence of these translations most exciting is Bolaño's Shakespearean appreciation for jokes. I haven't seen much exploration of this particular aspect of his writing, but both of these novels brim with humor, from the tense tomfoolery of two writerly rivals dueling on a beach to the darkly vicious jokes of the detectives investigating unsolvable murders: "Then the inspector, exhausted after a night's work, wondered to himself how much of God's truth lay hidden in ordinary jokes." Laughter requires humility, which forces you to put your ego in check, oftentimes easier said than done. Bolaño baits these moments, however, reminding his characters and readers that life, while not a joke, is not a dance. Life is not a prescribed set of steps, but a consistently inconsistent stream of events and happenstance, full of contradictions and confusions, sorrows and the sublime, it can ramble, deviate and detour, and like many jokes, the punch line is not always delivered correctly, or even understood as humorous.Both Gaddis and Bolaño use laughter - at times crass, inappropriate and awkward - because it possesses the tremendous power to disarm you, an effect the characters in Ford's book would have avoided at all costs. Had Ford's narrator acknowledged laughter as an invaluable impulse, perhaps the circumstances of his life would not strike him as so strange. But of course, that was Ford's point. For my taste, too much contemporary fiction forgoes laughter. There just is not enough laughter (smirking at irony doesn't count), probably because the authors and their characters take themselves too seriously. There's nothing wrong with being serious, but as Gaddis and Bolaño demonstrate, laughter can morph into the proverbial light in darkness, revealing the unnoticed or unrealized, much of which is serious, though it surfaces when we least expect it, caught off guard in the throes of belly-holding laughter.More from A Year in Reading 2008

Early in the year, after seeing much about it, I read Kent Haruf’s posthumously publishedOur Souls at Night. I’d never read anything by him before and, in truth, had hardly heard of him. But the apparent simplicity of the premise -- a widow and a widower decide to sleep together nightly, without sex, to stave off loneliness -- intrigued me. I wondered how he might pull it off, and in well under 200 pages, too; surely there had to be more going on.
What made the book so superb and moving is that it is, indeed, a simple story: the two of them talk, share their pasts, and negotiate a few conflicts in the present, all rendered in prose as clear as mountain spring water. Unlike many flashier novels I’ve read lately, however, in which the busier surfaces cover up shallow sentiments and hollow characterizations, Haruf’s restrained book contains emotional multitudes.
Curious to read more of his work, I checked out Plainsong, the first in a trilogy about the fictional town of Holt, Colo. It was even better: written in the same unadorned style, it effortlessly shuttles among several characters, braiding their stories in a way that doesn’t seem contrived, as it so often can with ensemble narratives. You might assume from the setting that Haruf traffics in Midwestern schmaltz, but any uplift is hard-earned, and his work confronts darkness as much as it does beauty.
The little I’ve learned about Haruf as a person corroborates the humility and wisdom of these two novels. He didn’t publish his first book until he was 41; he constantly deflected attention from himself; he was a devoted teacher; he wrote daily. In a personal essay for Granta called “The Making of a Writer,” published shortly before he died in 2014, he wrote: “I felt as though I had a little flame of talent, not a big talent, but a little pilot-light-sized flame of talent, and I had to tend to it regularly, religiously, with care and discipline, like a kind of monk or acolyte, and not to ever let the little flame go out.”
Not only his six books, but his modesty and commitment to his craft are worthy of learning from and attempting to emulate, particularly as all of us -- even writers of quiet fiction -- become increasingly expected to brand ourselves like celebrities. Haruf’s aesthetic and practice were straightforward seeming, his output relatively small, yet his work contains multitudes and will burn steadily past his death.
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Mark Sarvas's debut novel Harry, Revised, compared by the Chicago Tribune to Updike and Roth, has been sold in more than a dozen countries. He is also the host of internationally renowned litblog The Elegant Variation, and a member of the National Book Critics Circle. His criticism has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, the Dallas Morning News, the Philadelphia Inquirer, The Threepenny Review and elsewhere.Well, my favorite book of this year - of quite a few years - is Joseph O'Neill's magisterial Netherland but it's been deservedly praised everywhere, so I will save my word count for a less well-publicized book. And a non-fiction title, to boot. Rob Riemen'sNobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal was my surprise of 2008, a slender but dense cri de coeur from Yale University Press. It hit my radar around the same time that Sarah Palin hit ours, and I could think of no more stirring rebuttal to the proud ignorance she represents than Riemen's heartfelt pitch for the grand old values of Western Civ. The author, founder of the Nexus Institute, a European humanist think-tank, populates his crash course in the great thinkers with the likes of Socrates and Thomas Mann, and I can think of no better book for the President-elect's bedside table. Nobility of Spirit argues (among other things) that the pursuit of High Thought will always - must always - trump the pursuit of Fleeting Gain. (And as we move uncertainly through a historic meltdown of our financial infrastructure, we see just how fleeting it can be.) In the end, Riemen argues, high ideals (embodied by art) are as essential as food and shelter. The examined self never seemed so timely. (And, as a bonus title, I finally got around to Ed Hirsch's glorious How To Read a Poem and Fall In Love with Poetry, a book that makes me want to grab my Norton anthology and read every poem out loud. To be passionate about literature is unfashionable in too many quarters these days; Hirsch is an essential corrective.)More from A Year in Reading 2008